Featuring new paintings fresh from the easel, exhibition news and other stuff from Peter Barker RSMA

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

Dazzling Sea, Sidmouth

Oil on Board, 12 x 17 inches

Back on Oils now; I wanted to capture the intense light of this breezy day at Sidmouth on the south Devon coast, when the wind-whipped breakers were dazzling with pure sunlight bouncing of them. Intense light like this is difficult to portray with the miserably inadequate brightness of the lightest colour in the artist's armoury, Titanium White. The trick is to reserve the white for the lightest bit of the painting, the sea below the hill, fuzz the bottom of the hill to give the impression of the dazzling sunlight, then paint the highlights of the clouds a tone darker and warmer than the sea. There, now I've told you, my career is over. I shall just have to kill all of you.

My parents married on February 15th, 1947 after a Valentine's night works dance, then drove down to Sidmouth in one of the worst winters on record, with my dad's open-topped Hillman, with the top down ! There's flash !

Shan't be posting again until next week - don't forget to come and see me demonstrating (painting, not with placards) in the painting Marquee No23 at Patchings Art Festival if you are going !